


An Illicit Education

by GryfoTheGreat



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Books, Education, Gen, Reading, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-10
Updated: 2015-03-10
Packaged: 2018-03-17 07:44:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3521126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GryfoTheGreat/pseuds/GryfoTheGreat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sisters and brothers and the bond between them, strung through the lines of a history book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. educate a woman; educate a generation

**Author's Note:**

> I didn’t think I’d like this show, then the Blakes showed up and I knew I was screwed. (Sibling relationships are my catnip. Also books. Both play a part.)

Octavia likes Clarke perfectly fine. Sure, she's a little bossy sometimes (read: constantly) and is kinda self-righteous, but Octavia owes her her own life, her brother's life, and Lincoln's life several times over, so. (Also, she does a pretty on-point impression of Jaha, down to the slightly paternal, mostly patronising wrinkles in his brow.)

But Clarke is smart, ridiculously so, her mind sharper than any blade. She doesn't have Raven's mechanical genius, or Monty's ability to make miracles out of wires, but she must have read and memorised every book on the Ark.

That's why sometimes, when Clarke references something ("we don't have a nuclear football, Raven") or looks at Octavia like she expects her to know ("so electricity flows from...") Octavia feels incredibly stupid. It's not her fault, really. Girls who live under the floor don't go to school. It was Bellamy's job to teach her, and, given that he was a teenage boy with a terrible attention span, he did pretty well.

He taught her to write (crouched under the table, A is for Ark, B is for Blake, C is for Council...), to read (no adventures or romances or simple childish books for her but stuffy schoolbooks snuck home under his jacket, doodled thrice-over in the margins), taught her maths (neither of them ever got their heads around differentiation) and science (she would have liked biology more, she thinks, but Bell took chemistry) and history, and they both loved history, loved the dictators and the democracies and revolutions and rebellions.

But Bellamy was never the best student, and Octavia herself had too much energy to stay still and let her brother lecture her on there, they're and their, so she didn't get too incredibly far, and the Ark didn't bother wasting schooling on juvenile delinquents. Her mother used to tell her an illicit education was better than none, and Bellamy would grumble that he was a _guard_ , not a teacher, _so suck it up, O, I'm all you got._

Perhaps Clarke realises that. Maybe she figures it out when she looks at Octavia's handwriting to see that she forms her Es the same way Bell does (curved, like the old euro sign except with only one dash), or when Octavia doesn't know who Dickinson was or why she felt a funeral in her brain, or when she doesn't laugh when someone calls the mitochondria the powerhouse of the cell.

Of course, Clarke goes right ahead and does the Clarke thing, and fixes the problem. Octavia is dragged in for lessons on everything Clarke knows (and Clarke knows a lot, knows what exactly a mitochondria is and how the balance of power tipped between Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s and why you leave mysterious mushrooms alone, because Bellamy _sucked_ at Earth Skills) and finds, to her delight, that biology is indeed her preferred science and that differentiation is a lot easier when you figure out how the chain rule works.

"Like filling in the blanks," Clarke tells her, and Octavia thinks of it like that, Clarke stoppering the holes in her brother-built mind with knowledge, and finally realises why they call it a thirst.

 


	2. what strange creatures brothers are!

Siblings are a strange concept to Clarke. She’s only ever read of them in books, elegant older sisters who always know more than you and scrappy little brothers with no front teeth. She can't imagine it, her mother suddenly dropping a little boy with round brown eyes and tawny hair into her life and expecting her to love him and care for him no matter how horrible he may be. Clarke wonders how you could love someone who was forced into your life without your consent.

So when Octavia runs to Bellamy and he releases her onto the soil of Earth, Clarke watches in amazement. They are the first brother and sister she has ever seen, though they are little alike; they have the same hair colour and the same arrogant half-smile, directed at each other like beams of blinding sunlight, but Octavia is pale and burns whereas her brother is dark and tans incredibly easily, and Bellamy is deliberate where his sister is rash. They don't hate each other (though how anyone could even  _like_ that man is beyond her comprehension); rather, they seem to love each other. It is evident in the easy way Octavia slots into her brother's side, in how Bellamy's eyes seem to soften ever so slightly when he looks at her and her smile, wide with the sheer delight of freedom.

Clarke continues her study surreptitiously over that first nightmarish month on the ground. The Blakes fight an awful lot, sometimes over small things like 'hey, that was my ration pack!' and 'please, O, could you warn me before bursting into my tent?' and ‘you were the one who farted, don’t blame it on me!’ but other times over big things, like Atom and the Grounder and Aurora Blake.

(Clarke asks Bellamy why he had to look after Octavia, and not their mother. "She was otherwise occupied," he says flatly, and returns to his axe throwing with a little more force than needed.)

What Clarke concludes is this; the love of siblings is unconditional and irrational and wholly pure. They may have been roaring at each other not ten minutes beforehand, but when they sit down to eat, knee to knee, Bellamy's plate empties at an inversely proportional rate to Octavia's (when she catches him sneaking her food she stuffs a hunk of jerky into his mouth and he almost chokes) and Octavia generally ends up spewing her dinner everywhere when her brother says something with that look on his face that means he's trying not to smile. (Clarke still has no idea why the words 'toilet roll' and 'Augustus-tush' are hilarious to the both of them.)

This is what love sees, Clarke thinks, as Bellamy throws his pillow at Octavia to be met with a muffled 'ow, you ass!' and a blanket speeding at him across the campfire, which predictably bursts into flame. Clarke gives out to Octavia for wasting a blanket and almost burning her brother, to which Octavia responds "Sorry, Mom!" and freezes, blinking like a deer caught in the glare of a flashlight..

Clarke hesitates, notes Bellamy's stupefied stare and retorts; "What have I told you about sarcasm, young lady?"

"That was a joke, right? Holy shit, Clarke, you made a  _joke_." Octavia's expression matches her brother's perfectly, down to the incredulous head-tilt.

"Language, O." Said brother throws the remnants of the blanket into the fire. "Don't swear at Mother Griffin."

"Exactly. Now go to sleep, or I'm putting you on first watch." A chorus of complaint rumbles to life, but the silence that falls afterwards stays.

(In the middle of the night, someone's tearful snuffling wakes her up. When she turns over to check through narrowed eyes, reaching for the knife she keeps in her belt, Octavia is huddled over her brother’s prone form. "It's fine, Bell. It's fine. I'm here."

For a long moment nothing happens, but then one freckled arm hooks around Octavia's waist as her brother pulls her down, their hands tangling together like a lifeline.

Clarke shuts her eyes and, after wrestling with her guilt for intruding (because she and Bellamy are more alike than she’d like to admit and she’d hate for a stranger to see her sobbing after a bad dream), falls asleep to Octavia humming brokenly under her breath, harmonising with the sigh of the wind and the rustle of the leaves and Bellamy's even breathing, weighed down by sleep.)


	3. i’m no more than your brother

To Bellamy's dismay, the bunker contains no guns, no bullets, no  _anything_. "Great," he grumbles, kicking the bedstead. "That's another trip wasted." They could have been trying out Raven's new traps, or they could have been following the path of that river and seeing if there’s an easier way to cross it than the fast running ford about two miles down, but  _no_ , Finn said there was some stupid bunker out northwest "so why don't you do a little sibling bonding and go and check it out?" and now all he and Octavia have to show for their trip are muddy shoes and some gone-off peanut butter.

"Wait, Bell..." Octavia crouches down to shine a light underneath the bed he kicked, the shift of it revealing a dusty plastic crate. "Do you...?"

The both of them haul it out, and he's sort of glad that Earth has toughened Octavia up (not like she wasn’t tough before, he played enough slaps with her when they were kids to know that) because the box feels like it’s filled with concrete. Bellamy snaps a rung off one of the bunk beds to lever the lid open, and it comes off with a protest to reveal-

Octavia squeals as she picks up a book, one of many inside it. "Look, they have a book on mythology!"

Bellamy goes digging, and finds more. There is poetry, from Catullus to Cummings, there's the Hardy Boys and their friend Nancy Drew, all seven Harry Potters, there's historical fiction and historical non-fiction (he is way more excited over that then he should be), there's a Bible and Steinbeck and Hemingway and Orwell (finally, he can get all the dumb conch references Clarke's been making) and some epic poetry, Paradise Lost and Song of Myself and the Odyssey and even two meaty volumes of Shakespeare, plays in one and sonnets in the other.

He leafs through the first one and beams up at his sister. "They included Coriolanus!"

Octavia pauses. "Is it bad that I thought 'Aufidius' and then 'Murphy'?"

"Just don't let him stand on my corpse. We need to get these back. This stuff is-"

"Priceless," Octavia finishes, admiring the beautifully bound cover of an Austen compilation.

They carry it back between them (and Bellamy is thankful to whatever god is up there that they don't run into any Grounders) and stagger jubilantly through the gates.

"We come bearing literature!" Octavia announces.

"And Twilight. We can always use it as kindling." Bellamy lowers the box. "Careful, paper doesn't always age well."

Clarke barrels out of the dropship, wild eyed and bloody, and he's not even going to ask because Clarke is always bloody nowadays. "Books? Please tell me Tolkien's in there."

"In all his drawn-out pastoral glory." Just like that Clarke is on the box, but he hauls her back and makes her go wash the gore off her hands before she can hunt through it, exhibiting the sort of glee he only ever sees when they successfully blow something up.

"Fear and Loathing?" Jasper asks, and when he nods he hunkers down beside Clarke, who is exclaiming over the Hobbit.

By nightfall everyone is reading - Monty found Neuromancer, and Raven is loudly criticising Holmes - and when Bellamy retires for the night with his place in Julius Caesar marked, Octavia is sprawled out on his pallet. (That's a new thing - she likes to take up as much space as possible, now that there's room to do it.)

She's reading, mouthing the words (she never did quite get the hang of reading in her head) and smiling widely. For a second Bellamy thinks he is back on the Ark, that their mother is at the table, mouth full of needles, and that the gun on his back is guard-issue-

The moment passes when Octavia rolls over to look at him and she looks happy, far happier than she'd ever been in their boxroom apartment, shoved in between two scrubbers that made the air of the room vibrate. "Hey, Bell!"

"Shouldn't you be in your own tent?" He pulls the gun off his back, inspecting the chamber and flicking the safety.

"Yeah, but..." She waves the book at him; he catches a glimpse of the word Rome. "I wanted to read with you. You say it all so much better... even if you pronounce Caesar weird."

"I pronounce it  _right_. Kai-zar. Ignore Finn, he's full of shit." He thumps down onto the bed beside her and plucks the book out of her hands. "Where are you now?"

"Where do you think?" Octavia pulls her legs up onto the bed as he settles the book in his lap, and opens it to find Augustus staring up at him, eyes blank beneath the slight curl of his fringe.

"You've heard this a million times, O. What about Trajan?"

"Nah, I'm good with Gus." She pokes his forehead, where his hair threatens to fall into his eyes. "Hey, you look a little like him now! Keep your name, though, I wouldn't be able to remember all that."

"It's easy! Octavius until Caesar adopted him, Octavian until he became Emperor, and Augustus thereafter." He doesn't realise how merdy that sounds until he's done saying it, by which time Octavia is flicking his nose. "Ow."

"Just get on with it." She presses her bony chin into his shoulder, and he tries to shrug her off, but Octavia can be an absolute limpet when she wants to so he eventually gives in and starts reading. The words are easy because he knows this, he grew up with this, dreamed of crossing the Rubicon before he ever got to actually do it in real life, Finn dying downstairs and the Grounder (he refuses to refer to him as anything else) slumped between two chains, boots slipping against the slick floor.

Bellamy clears his throat and begins in his best history voice, grave and deep. "Augustus was the first emperor of Rome, and presided over one of the most tranquil eras in the history of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana. Plebeian in name only..."

He doesn't know when they fall asleep, only that they do, and he dreams of marble statues daubed with warpaint and crowned with barbed wire, guns tucked into the stone drapes of their togas.


End file.
